Bradley Manning apologises, admits he 'hurt US'

Fort Meade, Maryland: US Army private Bradley Manning has apologised for leaking secret intelligence files to WikiLeaks and admitted for the first time he had harmed his country and others.

"I'm sorry that my actions have hurt people and have hurt the United States," he told a military judge, Colonel Denise Lind, at a sentencing hearing at Fort Meade, northeast of Washington, on Wednesday.

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More than 100,000 people have signed a petition calling for his nomination for a Nobel Peace Prize.

But the US government has painted him as a reckless traitor who put his fellow soldiers and country in danger when he handed over 700,000 secret documents to the anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks while deployed in Iraq.

Private Manning's defence team has argued the US Army private was a naive but well-intentioned young man who hoped to ignite a public debate over the conduct of the American diplomats and troops abroad.

The defence has suggested that Private Manning's superiors ignored repeated signs of his emotional distress and should never have allowed him to deploy to Iraq or retain his security clearance.

"Being in the military and having a gender issue does not exactly go hand in hand," said a military psychologist

Earlier at the sentencing hearing, experts testified that Private Manning was plunged into a solitary anguish as he struggled over his sexual identity amid a "hostile" military environment.

"Being in the military and having a gender issue does not exactly go hand in hand," Captain Michael Worsley, a military clinical psychologist, told the court.

"At the time, the military was not exactly friendly towards the gay community," he said.

Captain Worsley diagnosed Private Manning with a personality disorder and then a "gender identity disorder," and said the soldier would have faced an agonising plight in the macho world of the military.